The ABCs Of Building A Cause-Related Brand

David Vinjamuri
, ContributorTeach grad students at NYU. Former Brand Manager.Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.

Big brands have embraced cause-related marketing. From Member’s Project by American Express to the American Heart Association endorsement of Cheerios, large brands like to link themselves to worthy causes. Launching a cause-related campaign is simple: just find a cause, fund it, and trumpet the results.

Cause marketing may be a flashy tactic, but it fails as a branding strategy. Consumers see through the hype. If the connection between the brand and the cause is shallow, the impact on the brand is minimal. How many brand sponsors of Project Red, The Race For The Cure or The March of Dimes can you name? One or two? That’s because brands without a meaningful connection to a cause are overshadowed by these purpose-driven organizations or events.

Building a Cause-Related Brand

To link a brand inextricably with a cause, you must rebuild the brand from the ground up. That’s exactly what has happened over the past decade at one venerable Manhattan institution. Instead of throwing quick money at a cause and broadcasting the results, it has done nearly the opposite. The brand has had a meaningful impact on the cause it supports, but the story is untold.

The business has no Wikipedia entry. You won’t read the tale on its website. If you step into its flagship store just off of Union Square, you’d be forgiven for thinking you’d wandered into an enormous, high-end boutique. The products have mysterious symbols on the tags, like a lost language. Most locals think “carpet” when they hear its name, but you’d be hard pressed to find the carpets in the enormous nine-story flagship store of the 130-year old business (they’re on the sixth floor and across the street).

For ten years, however, this mysterious local giant has been quietly changing the face of retailing from the high end, creating ripples that have disrupted manufacturing and retailing – all in pursuit of a cause-driven mission that the great-great-great-granddaughter of the founder has taken to heart.

If ABC Carpet & Home is an enigma, it’s because the brand has embedded itself so deeply into the psyche of its unique core clientele that an outsider needs a briefing more than a brochure. CEO Paulette Cole has been in

and around ABC her entire life and pioneered its expansion from carpets into home goods and accessories in the 1980’s. She took a two-year sabbatical in 2001 and returned as CEO of ABC Home in 2003 with a purpose. Her vision was to turn the venerable retailer into a leader in sustainability.

Re-Branding From The Inside Out

From the outset, she understood the peril. ABC started its journey just before the era of “green washing” – the practice of slapping the label “green” onto products after adding a single healthy ingredient. Cole intuitively understood that ABC had to make fundamental changes in its own business model as well as the products it sold. She called in Aveda founder Horst Rechelbacher to help her staff understand the concept of sustainability and how to build an environmental business.

Cole’s first moves were internal. She overhauled the store’s own operations to be more environmentally friendly. Furniture was transported with recycled blankets. Starch peanuts replaced Styrofoam as a packing material. Even the cleaning practices for the flagship store itself were overhauled to use nontoxic cleaners. She also brought in Amy Chender as Director for Social Responsibility. Chender had taken a lead role in protesting the Indian Point nuclear power plant and is now COO.

Transforming The Supply Chain

ABC quickly realized that wood was a problem. Rainforest deforestation is a major sustainability issue, and ABC sells a great deal of wood furniture. When Cole went to the High Point furniture market in North Carolina and started asking questions about the provenance of the wood used to build the furniture sold in the market, she caused a sensation. Most furniture builders either didn’t know where their wood was coming from or had no way to verify what they’d been told.

Solving the problem required a new approach. In 2004, ABC partnered with the Rainforest Alliance to certify lumber that was renewably sourced. ABC trademarked the Goodwood™ brand to identify sustainably built furniture. This move has had downstream effects in the industry, causing both manufacturers and other retailers to pay attention to wood sourcing.

Cole and Chender continued to overhaul the offerings throughout the store. In some areas like textiles and apparel, they working to persuade existing vendors to adopt sustainable manufacturing practices. In other areas, appropriate products already existed, and transforming the retail space was just a matter of curating them for consumers. Amy Chender explained the changes in ABC’s bedding business:

We spend a third of our lives in our bedroom. Most traditional mattresses are created with toxic chemicals and materials that off-gas. With ABC Dream, we now give our customers access to state-of-the-art natural and organic mattresses.

Beauty – a business that ABC calls “Apothecary” was another early effort. Cole repeated something I also remember Myriam Zaoui (co-founder of The Art of Shaving) telling me: “whatever you put on your skin gets into your bloodstream.” Then she proceeded to point out that,

There is aluminum in pretty much every product found on the beauty shelves and you can find that same aluminum in breast tissue. Women don’t even know that they’re making that choice. Why is that okay? We work with vendors to take carcinogens out of beauty products.

There was already a movement in beauty to create healthy and sustainable products. In fact, Cole tells me that she was one of the first stores to stock Burt’s Bees in the 1980’s and she begged Roxanne Quimby to let her have some of the original signage. Still, ABC pushed vendors to move faster, and to create a wider range of products for its well-heeled clientele.

It is that clientele that distinguishes ABC. ABC caters to a group of core customers who are willing to spend real money to buy sustainable products – now even extending to designer apparel. While the causes that ABC supports – its windows are currently filled with a Yoko Ono installation opposing fracking – might seem risky, they mirror the views of these core customers. And most importantly, they are consistent with every business practice of the store.

You Are What You Eat

In the last two years, ABC has taken the last step in its brand transformation by changing the way its patrons eat. The flagship store has long had two restaurants, but in 2010 Cole partnered with celebrity chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten to relaunch the main restaurant as ABC Kitchen. ABC Kitchen was created as a sustainable business, with a spiritual connection to the slow food movement championed by Alice Waters. In addition to ensuring that the food itself was made from organic and sustainably raised local ingredients, ABC Kitchen extended the theme to the operations of the restaurant itself. Plates, knives, place settings and decorations were all sustainably sourced.

The cause-driven restaurant has been spectacularly successful. It won the James Beard Award for best new restaurant of 2011, a major coup in Manhattan’s intense restaurant scene. The elements that distinguish ABC were also an intimate part of ABC Kitchen’s success as chef Vongerichten explains, “Artful design and exquisite, locally sourced food should go hand-in-hand”